[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Acute Senses

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by whswhs

You could call it Targeting Vision Only, maybe.

Expanded Arc, 360°, is +125%, and 240° is +75%; the comparable visual advantages are 25 points and 15 points. Targeting Only is -40%, which suggests that Targeting Vision Only might be -8 points.

Bill Stoddard

Thank you.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I have used Acute Smell for tracker types but yeah, most of the time I will go for Alertness/Perception unless its just bumping up 1 sense for concept.
Racial templates are where I see these used the most.
I disagree with you on Telescopic though, its great for snipers, spies, etc. Especially in a low tech game where you may not have gear to do it.

I'm not saying that they're not great. They all have their uses. But I don't want to juggle Acute Vision +2, Telescopic Vision 1, Parabolic hearing 2, Acute Hearing +3, and so on. So I tend to pick and choose and stick with them. Except on racial templates, where I agree with you (there it's okay to start to introduce weird concepts, because a racial template is the perfect place for something like that).

Part of the problem is that there really aren't many counter-parts to these. Things like Bad Sight are really big and chunky, as opposed to Acute Vision's fine gradations. The result isn't you can't really fine tune a specific set of senses. Thus, I see people muck about with Perception more than anything else.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by corwyn

Limiting realistic levels to a specific value of Acute Sense as opposed to a specific value of sense roll always bothered me. Why is IQ 12, Acute Vision +2 realistic, where IQ 10, Acute Vision +4 not?

Because the IQ 10 doesn't really see less than the IQ 12 other things being equal. It's just not as good at figuring out what it is that it is seeing

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Because the IQ 10 doesn't really see less than the IQ 12 other things being equal. It's just not as good at figuring out what it is that it is seeing

Really, part of this is a convention of heroic fiction. GURPS says that a spider has IQ 1, a lizard has IQ 2, a dog has IQ 4, a baboon has IQ 5, and a chimpanzee has IQ 6—and a man can have IQ from 6 up to 20. Why the huge variation? Because people don't want to play characters who all have species-normal IQ, or even characters limited to ±1.

In the same way, we have body weight varying as the cube of ST for animals—so an ST 5 cat weights 16 pounds, and an ST 22 horse weights 1330 pounds—but an ST 20 man doesn't weigh half a ton!

GURPS allows human traits to vary widely, but maps animal traits onto the same scale, with human beings falling onto it around a score of 10. But the numbers aren't really measuring the same things.

Bill Stoddard

[Not]

It ought to be IQ that scales broadly. 10 average men can drag a weight or dig a hole as well as the strongest man, but a million ordinary persons working day and night couldn't solve, for example, the Poincare Conjecture.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Sensing vs. Perceiving. Different processes.

Could you explain the difference? It seems to me that the human eye can either see something or it can't.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

Could you explain the difference? It seems to me that the human eye can either see something or it can't.

You have sensory organs which register triggers (e.g. photons falling onto the retina) and send impulses to the brain; you sense brightness, or a sound, or a warm touch. You perceive as the brain interprets the signals into something meaningful - you perceive the sun, a melody, a hug.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

You have sensory organs which register triggers (e.g. photons falling onto the retina) and send impulses to the brain; you sense brightness, or a sound, or a warm touch. You perceive as the brain interprets the signals into something meaningful - you perceive the sun, a melody, a hug.

Or more to the point, two people can look at the same clump of bushes, but only one of them see the machine gun position hidden in it.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Or more to the point, two people can look at the same clump of bushes, but only one of them see the machine gun position hidden in it.

But the human eye's resolution is limited. The way GURPS represents that is with your Vision sense--whatever that number is. I haven't done the math on it, so I don't know what the limit is, but I don't see how it makes sense to say that a person can "perceive" things at resolutions no human eye can detect. Perceptive ability of the brain isn't what's in question here. If you have two men stand next to each other, and move back away from them, eventually you (and anyone else with a human eye) will no longer be able to discern how many men are there, and that's because of how the eye works, rather than your brain's perceptive ability.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

But the human eye's resolution is limited. The way GURPS represents that is with your Vision sense--whatever that number is. I haven't done the math on it, so I don't know what the limit is, but I don't see how it makes sense to say that a person can "perceive" things at resolutions no human eye can detect. Perceptive ability of the brain isn't what's in question here. If you have two men stand next to each other, and move back away from them, eventually you (and anyone else with a human eye) will no longer be able to discern how many men are there, and that's because of how the eye works, rather than your brain's perceptive ability.

People tend to fail to perceive something way earlier than they stop sensing it.